Ever This Day

[clarencebunsen]

I've read a few variations of Sally Pepper over the past couple years. It's always compelling. I keep thinking there should be some sort of song to post but I come up dry. My fear is that someone will come up with one from some awful made-fo-TV movie.

[clarencebunsen]

You are probably safe from being a labeled a pornographer here. Heretic perhaps, as soon as we figure out what the canon is.

I have enjoyed reading your revised stories. Revising my own writing is not something I do well so there is always hope I'll learn something.

Expansion of a short story or essay has its risks. Late in his career Isaac Asimov expanded a couple of his memorable short stories, "Nightfall" and "The Ugly Little Boy", into novels. I thought "The Ugly Little Boy" was improved by developing the characters and their motivations. Adding back stories to "Nightfall" seemed, to me, to dilute the intensity of a powerful snapshot. Of course, if you ask 3 other Asimov fans you will have 4 different opinions of how well the expansions worked.

[clarencebunsen]

I was unfamiliar with both the song and the group, a pleasant surprise.

[chris]

I was unfamiliar with both the song and the group, a pleasant surprise

CB that's because they are the most newest new band sensation...like over night placing the Biemer in 2nd place.

[clarencebunsen]

I guess I need to listen when my granddaughter asks me to change the station on the car radio.

[clarencebunsen]

Another great trip. The father in the penultimate post echoes one of the scenes from Monk which impacted me the most.

I liked the music choices, some good but unfamiliar choices mixed with old favorites. My wife is a big fan of Celtic Woman and I'm a fan of "You Raise Me Up" when her choir sings it. Of course we so seldom have fireworks during mass.

Something I read tonight: "Every moment a man lives is inexorably and deeply bound to the instant of his death ... Perhaps when all is said and done learning to die is more important than fighting to stay alive." The writer is Kathleen O'Neal Gear.

[dave]

CB, I had meant to respond to this a couple of months ago, because it rang a few bells in my head. I can't remember all that much any more so I'm personally thankful for the Internet and search engines such as Google. I finally went looking and found Plato's mention of the Three Morai (moira, tyche and daemon) which tie into the idea of birth relating to death (at least the first two.)
See:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moirai

which I think you will enjoy.

Also, Google Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, who treated the topic in his last lecture after a cancer diagnosis.

And, of course, Thomas Merton discuses the topic (what DIDN'T he discuss?) in various places. Google Thomas Merton's Death and Dying.

From an interesting page, "Reflections on Death and Dying / Buddhist and Catholic Teachings and Practices," Monks In The West, at :

www.urbandharma.org/mitw/mitw/mitw1/dying1.html

comes this quote:

"Karl Rahner, in an essay written near the end of his own life, observed that “death rightly understood is an event involving the whole person” and that it takes place “not by any means necessarily in the chronological moment of the medical exitus . . . but occurs in a true sense throughout the whole of life.” [5] Centuries earlier, St. Augustine made essentially the same point when he wrote that “if every person begins to die, that is, is in death as soon as death has begun to show itself in him, . . . then he begins to die as soon as he begins to live.” "

[dave]

NOTE: Sally Pepper and Ever This Day now appear only on my website at windsweptpress.com. I began doing this a week or so ago to simplify the marketing of my work. (I.e., I now will have to argue with publishers only about a story occurring in my online Windswept Journal instead of multiple locations on the Internet.) I will place stories here and on MoreStories in the future, but leave them up for only a short period of time.

[clarencebunsen]

It was an interesting article. Of course the internet being what it is I was soon following links and found myself buried in articles on Proto-Indo-European and the Laryngeal Theory. For some reason that reminded me of something I'd read in Gore Vidal's Creation and I had to grab that book and find the reference. It's a big book and I didn't find what I wanted but I did find some other forgotten passages. I have to stop doing that.

[dave]

Mar 18, 2013 10:29:59 GMT -5 clarencebunsen said:

It's a big book and I didn't find what I wanted but I did find some other forgotten passages. I have to stop doing that.

I always wanted to write a story of a cheating wife who routinely shifts her husband's attention elsewhere for the evening by asking him to look up a word in the dictionary for her. At the end, she arrives home, hair askew, clothing disheveled and lipstick smeared over her face. The husband meets her at the door and says, "Did you know that a 'proscenium' can be both an arch and a wall?"

[clarencebunsen]

Of course in most theaters the proscenium arch (literally "in front of the scene") is a rectangle. I had never thought of it as a wall although I'm familiar with the term "beyond the 4th wall."

In my senior year for our high school contest play I was the only cast member beyond the wall, in effect a part of the audience rather than part of the cast but able to direct the audience's attention to where we wanted it.

The competition was held at a school with a much larger stage (and proscenium arch) than our small bandbox. At the curtain I was supposed to make my exit during the brief interval between the stage lights going off & the house lights raising. On the larger stage I was only half way before the lights came on leaving me feeling very exposed.

My wife is much more modern. She would ask me to look up a recipe on the internet knowing that I would soon be lost in pages of the types of oregano and their historical uses.

[dave]

Hahaha. That reminds me of a small players group I did publicity for years ago in Endicott. They staged a play which had been the movie, "Take Her, She's Mine."

The stagecraft was rather involved for little theater and the crew built a lazy Susan style contraption in the middle of the stage that functioned as two sets when twisted around 180 degrees, and also a set on each side of the turntable. At one point the father, played by a fellow who I knew well from work, leaves stage left while the scene continues in a set made up to be a hotel room, walks around behind the scenery, including the contraption in the middle, and emerges to open a new scene in the set at stage right, made up to look like an airport exterior with the side of an airliner painted on the backdrop and a piece of short cyclone fence for Dad to lean on and reach across to stop his daughter from getting on the plane. (No enclosed walkways in those days.)

It's a tight squeeze to get between the back wall of the center turntable and the back wall of the stage, but my friend Charley is a thin guy. The Saturday night of the second performance when he gets to the small space behind the turntable, it's gone. Turns out the school maintenance staff had pushed the turntable back a foot to expose a trap door on the stage floor and now the revolving set is hard against the back wall of the stage.

Resourceful as ever but with little time, Charley turns around and goes out the back stage door, runs down the hallway and bolts out a door to the parking lot, where he runs into a prodigious snow storm taking place. He fights his way through the blizzard, slipping and sliding through six inches of snow across the lawn to the hallway door that will lead to the opposite side of the stage. The door is locked.

Charley begins to bang on the door and shout, but no one hears him. They're all in the auditorium waiting for someone to show up at the faux airport. So Charley runs at full clip all the way around the building to the front, enters the door and runs down the side hall and through the door that will take him to stage right. He flies up the stairs and through wings and literally lands in the scene of an airport in Florida ... coughing and out of breath with snow on his head and shoulders. The two other actors had come on stage and were trying to hold an ad lib conversation to cover the loss of Charley. The audience thought it was a joke and waited for a funny line from him. All Charley could think to say was, "Boy, was it ever chilly in that airport bar!" It brought the house down.

Take Her, She's Mine, the last ten minutes.



Entertainment has traveled a long way from Family Friendly.
Below is a link to the Sean Paul video - She Doesn't Mind.
I normally don't care for this type of music, but the video is irresistible, suffused with alcohol and drugs, as well as crass with product placement shots. Plus, it's pornographic. So be careful who you watch it with. I'll have to send you out of the room to view it. I wonder what TSA employees think of it.